Review: The Dumb House - John Burnside

I picked this one up because Jean on BookishThoughts on Youtube raved about it and I thought it sounded interesting. 

It is about a man who is fascinated by language and the soul. Growing up he has a very close relationship with his mother, while his father mostly seems to be in the way of the two of them. Together the two go looking for dead animals in the woods, because for some reason the mother wants the son to see what things look like dead. This sort of sets the tone for the entire book, where all the son’s relationships and thoughts and deeds are just a bit off. Well, more than a bit. 

When he was a child his mother would also tell him a story about children raised in complete silence in order to see if they would speak an “original” language, a language of the soul, so to speak, and he becomes fascinated with this thought. A chain of events leads to him meeting a young woman and having children with her, and he sees this as an opportunity to conduct a similar experiment himself. 

The book was a beautiful, but disturbing read. Burnside writes wonderfully, but the plot of the book was not exactly fun. We get to see the inner workings of a very disturbed mind. The main character is completely without empathy for the animals he starts his experiments on and later the human beings involved. Whenever he admits to caring for someone he states that he does so “in his own way” which basically means he cares for them as much as they are needed by him for his experiments. Once they cannot be used anymore they are discarded without second thought. He is the narrator, so we get his perspective on events, and we get to see how he thinks that all his decisions are logical and for the best, while anyone with a bit of human feeling can see that he is basically a psychopath. He will stop at nothing to aid his experiment and he really feels that this experiment is so important that basically torture, kidnapping and murder are all okay in order to conduct this experiment. 

I found it fascinating, but again disturbing, to read about a personality such as this, completely devoid of empathy or human feelings, wrapped up in the “science” of his experiment. I gave this book 4 stars out of 5 on Goodreads, because I thought it was well-written and fascinating, but I could have used a touch of feeling to counterbalance the cold, ruthless manner of his ways. Maybe that is partly the point, that he lives a life devoid of feelings, and since we see things from his perspective, we don’t get anyone to connect with, because he doesn’t either. But still…